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Inertial cavitation, often viewed by engineers as a destructive nuisance, may be useful in the future for delivering drugs precisely where they're needed in the human body, according to this article. Ultrasound, the technology that commonly provides images of the unborn, can also create inertial cavitation. Constantin Coussios of Oxford University’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering believes the effect can be used to generate bubbles that collapse and propel drugs into spots otherwise difficult to penetrate due to the densely packed cell structure of tumors.

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The problem of non-recyclable discarded umbrellas may soon be reduced with a new model made entirely with recyclable plastic that now has the funding to go into production. The Gingko umbrella from Italian designer Federico Venturi and mechanical engineer Gianluca Savalli is fashioned from PP plastic and has just 20 parts rather than the 120 that typically go into conventional umbrellas.

Raha Hakimdavar, a Ph.D candidate in engineering at Columbia University, will be working with the Netherlands' Delft University to develop a real-time sensor-and-satellite network for flood management in Haiti. The stakes are high, Hakimdavar notes, as frequent flash and hurricane-caused flooding in Haiti imposes many more hardships on the population than similar events in developed countries. The modern orbital and ground-based sensor network will do much to fill the information gaps about Haiti's climate and flood patterns, according to this article.

One in five breast cancer surgery patients in the U.S. now needs to return for a second visit to the operating room because the initial surgery failed to remove all the cancerous tissue, according to this article. But a new device from Johns Hopkins University grad students may reduce or eliminate that necessity. The prototype applies an adhesive film to removed breast tissue that holds the fatty tissue together for quick analysis, something that hadn't previously been possible.

From heat-transfer mobile applications to an engineering cookbook, Android smartphone apps are cropping up to aid mechanical engineers. In this article, Chitra Sethi takes a look at nine of them, including a 3D data-file viewer.

Rather than putting a donor liver on ice as it is transported to the intended recipient, a new device preserves the organ in a functioning state. The device developed by Constantin Coussios, an Oxford professor of biomedical engineering, and Peter Friend, director of the Oxford Transplant Centre, "can support human livers outside the body, keep them alive and functioning" until the transplant is performed hours later.